US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

Apparently a lot of people who've never been interested in Japan have referred to this meting as 'kabuki theatre' and you'll be unsurprised to find they're from the party of Noh.

x-post--Repubs say they're helping the poor by their alleged efforts to encourage small businesses and by allegedly making it easier for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Cliched but they say that (what they actually do in practice is a whole 'nuther story)

Some say the health care bill was a failure of marketing in that the large percentage of people who DO have health care need to see how this will help them; not just how it will it will help other folks (read poor) get health insurance. Do-gooderism for the poor isn't gonnna win over Independent voters

Some say the health care bill was a failure of marketing

Some are otm

Is do-gooderism for the poor gonna win over people on this thread?

it isn't being presented/marketed as "do-gooderism for the poor." the marketing angle is, "uninsured put incredible stress on the health care system, which raises costs for the insured population (e.g., they go to the ER for routine treatments (ERs can't deny services), but don't pay, causing providers and hospitals to pass those uncollected costs on the everyone else (obama says that alone costs every insured family 1K every year))."

BTW, the very morning i post here with assumptions about what demographic makes up the current GOP, the NYT has a feature story about the pierced-nosed, improv-performing 30-year old woman from ''a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses,'' who is credited with beginning the tea party movement.

Do right-wingers support laws to permit or require ERs to deny services? Or is that gonna sound too cruel? I gather those in the ER business don't mind the present state of affairs either, since they don't get stuck with the bill.

Government money should be used to bomb the poor, not help them! Right, McCain?

the most logical marketing for health-care reform, imo, doesn't have to do with the uninsured at all. i mean, you mention them in passing, but the people to appeal to are people who have health insurance -- because there are more of them and they're more politically powerful. and there's an easy way to appeal to them: lots of them already hate their health insurance companies, and almost all of them know that they are exactly one lay-off away from losing their insurance. the GOP talking point about how "most people are happy with their insurance" totally papers over how much angst and anxiety most people really feel about their insurance. not many people who have ever dealt with a health insurance company in any involved way have warm feelings toward them, and most people can relate to the sense of insecurity inherent in having your insurance tied to your employment. so the way to sell it is to say, look, if your insurance sucks, or if you lose your insurance, under this plan you will still be able to get affordable health care for your family. this is such an obvious framing of the issue that it boggles my mind that the democrats haven't been pounding it for the past year. advocacy groups could have flooded the airwaves with true horror stories of people who a.) thought they were insured and discovered their insurance wouldn't actually pay for x, y or z, so they went bankrupt; or b.) lost their jobs and their insurance at the same time, and then got sick. there are hundreds of thousands of those stories out there.

democrats are trying to appeal to a sense of charity or fairness, or on the wonky side they're making arguments about efficiency and economics, when they have a much better FEAR card to play than the republicans, but they haven't been using it. baffles me.

Obama was making the argument you're giving, tipsy, during the election at any rate. I guess he's stopped doing so?

I'm not convinced by any polls I've seen that "the people" really bought that argument to begin with, or that they've stopped buying it. But it's not like that kind of data has really mattered, anyway. The "debate", such as it has been, over the last year has been between elites. The status quo obviously benefits those elites. So the argument has turned on questions of charity, because it's the elites' charity that matters.

i think one "messaging"/"narrative" problem the democrats ran into was just--b/c health-care reform was a centerpiece of the party platform, and because it was the biggest non-iraq campaign promise obama made, dems went into it just assuming that everyone wanted health care to change. which apparently they didnt.

obama still makes that argument. the argument i mention above is the counterspin to the GOPs rhetoric.

obama could have deemphasized HCR, tho, in favor of, say, a massive jobs bill to compliment the stimulus package.

(jobs bill just got passed, anyway, but not b/c obama made it this No. 1 PR focus over HCR)

sorry, "made it his No. 1 . . ."

Something Nader said in his documentary, about there being no real political mandate if Gore had taken office, seems about right here. I think most Dems feel like they got elected because the narrative was "Anything but Bush" and as long as they fulfilled that very low standard, they didn't need to do a whole lot else.

watching mitch mcconnell on cnn. the depth of his dishonesty is astounding.

Im rewatching Sicko today, and there's a part where they go over the 1996 health care thing, and it's funny how all the talking points against it are exactly the same as they were 14 years ago. Same language, even some of the same people.

same language, same people, same vested interests. last time they were able to kick the can 16 years down the road. this time they probably figure they can't really do that, but every year they delay -- every 6 months they delay -- is just money, money, money to them. same is true with cap-and-trade. the energy companies probably figure some kind of crackdown is coming sometime, but every year they put it off is worth billions of dollars.

http://docgould.com/

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i will cast 2,000 votes for that man.

all hail west texas

ah hell, west texas

Gold
Underwear
Balance the Budget
God Bless

BTW, the very morning i post here with assumptions about what demographic makes up the current GOP, the NYT has a feature story about the pierced-nosed, improv-performing 30-year old woman from ''a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses,'' who is credited with beginning the tea party movement.

― Daniel, Esq., Sunday, February 28, 2010 8:15 AM Bookmark

Haha. I witnessed that Olympia protest. Got called a "socialist" by a woman on her way out, which kind of made my day. The counterprotest later that afternoon drew 2 or 3 times the crowd.

Verga said the biggest threat is the Americans who voted the Obama administration into office. “That was political correctness gone awry,” Verga said.

^^ this gentleman is running for political office

Biggest threat...to him, maybe.

the biggest threat to Americans is 53% of Americans

this is apropos of not very much (president's slip of the tongue, rush limbaugh making a bunch of race-y "aks" joeks, beefing with hendrik hertzberg), but i really really hate anne althouse. what a horrible woman. not up there with liz cheney but pretty far up there.

sorry that's 'ann'

haha jesus i just ctrl-f'd the corner thread, and i said the same thing twice last year. :/ :?

ha goole i was just reading hertzbergs response

althouse is a tool

different idiocy: http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/03/02/sarah-palin-is-no-longer-the-stupidest-republican-presidential-hopeful/

nobody got on Randy Newman's case when he wrote "Little Island"

dunno if this makes it less pathetic or more, but i've hated althouse since the jessica valenti/bill clinton "boob" controversy that she made up of whole cloth. that's like five years ago.

it'd be one thing if she was just another nominally-liberal-but-i-really-wanna-be-a-raging-right-winger blogger like mickey kaus, but she's a law professor? as in, she is paid to teach people to think about the world and the law in this manner? her argumentation is fucking laughable. make a crazy spurious accusation based on flimsy evidence, react hysterically when you get taken down, claim your opponents are the ones with the REAL problem, why do they even CARE so much, something to HIDE hmmm? lather, rinse, repeat...

So, that (pierced nose! improv-performing!) woman upthread had this to say in a healthcare town hall:

“If you believe that it is absolutely moral to take my money and give it to someone else based on their supposed needs,” she said, waving a $20 bill to boos and cheers, “then you come and take this $20 and use it as a down payment on this health care plan.”

Someone ELSE. THEIR "supposed" needs. I really want her to require expensive (and hopefully uninsured) medical procedures, like, NOW.

lets send her some anthrax

Oooooh the FBI is coming to you get yoooooo

oops better "commit suicide" before they can build a case against me!

on another topic: fucktard can't even put a sentence together

"I think Senator Bunning has - he's got a legitimate argument that he's making," House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said. "You know, the Democrats just passed this pay-go legislation and not – not even a week after the President signed it into law they want to exempt the first bill that comes across the Senate floor from the – from the regulations. And so it's - and he has a right as a senator to express his will and he has."

http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/countyfair/posts/obamabeer.jpg

If I had that man's fucking job and didnt drink I wouldnt last a day.

i watched hardball last night, and listened to POTUS radio on XM this morning. i heard repeated references to the failed or near-failed obama presidency (e.g., one commentator on hardball last night said obama would lean on wavering democratic representatives by threatening that they will be known as the reason obama's presidency failed if they vote "no" on HCR).

is this, overall, the way cable, TV and radio are portraying obama's presidency? i've been too deep in my blog, print news magazine ghetto to notice.

yeah a lot of people take it as given that this presidency has been a complete embarrassing disaster for this once great nation. i wonder why.

"a lot"

Which is why this is helpful and amusing.

this fucking guy

from tpm: Bunning Places Hold On All Nominations

whats the over/under on Obama having all his departments fully staffed by the time hes done being president? from what I read, he has some positions hes needed to fill since he won the goddamn election that are still being sat on.

more disgusting shit via tpm

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/liz_cheney_attacks_defense_attorneys_for_represent.php?ref=fpa

― max, Tuesday, March 2, 2010 6:11 PM (30 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yup, that line of attack from l. cheney is basic fascism. i know that is kossack hysterics or whatever but i dunno how else to talk about it.